Beyond a Mindless Action Movie

Rating: 7/10 (24 July 2013)

'Pacific Rim' looked to me like a mindless action movie in the trailer. I thought I was going to the theater to seeing two hours and eleven minutes of giant robots piloted by humans fighting giant aliens. Just about the first hour of this movie makes it more than a mindless action movie. This movie focused on the backgrounds of characters for a while and used character development to make us care about them more. That worked for some of the characters.
The acting in this movie as about average. Some of the performances were better than others. Some aspects of actors' performances were better than others. Charlie Hunnam was more of a lower quality performance. In some parts of the movie, I wasn't convinced he was really Raleigh Becket (his character in the movie), because he wouldn't say some of the dialog with feeling. It was like he was just reading lines some of the time. He had a bit of a British accent in the movie, but it seemed like it was only in affect in a small number of scenes in the movie. I don't think that anyone has a British accent in only a few parts of their life, so that makes it a bad thing. That bring up another performance: Idris Elba's. He had a better British accent than Hunnam, but it still only seemed to be in affect some of the time. Also, his acting performance was good, but he wasn't able to put enough stress on words at times. When Stacker Pentecost (his character) was supposed to put deep feeling into his words, Idris Elba wouldn't be able to put enough feeling into the words. Other than those things, his performance was fine, though. Rinko Kikuchi, who played Mako Mori, had the best performance out of the all of the actors I can think of. She didn't have any accent problems, she was able to put enough stress on words, and I was convinced she was Mako Mori. Her performance was good.
I couldn't find any problems with the writing in this movie. I didn't look for any problems in the writing, but it seemed realistic. In some parts, it seemed it little far fetched, though.
The CGI in this movie was great. It really didn't seem like nothing was there. All of the images blended in with the aspects of the scene. When there was almost nothing but CGI, it seemed like they (the images) were real. The only time I would really tell if there was CGI (if I didn't already know) if it was compared to an actual image.
Now, for the things I went to the movie to see: the action sequences. The action sequences were just CGI's fighting each other. I thought the sequences were great. They were very exciting and exhilarating. The sequences also didn't happen as much as I thought they would, but more would've been less, I think. It might have been like 'Man of Steel', where the action took a long time to get old. Here, the sequences never got old and they stayed exciting. The action was even better than I thought it was going to be in this movie. There's a clear reason for almost everything which causes less thinking during the scenes. Several points to the film for the acting sequences and events.
About the first forty five minutes of this movie after the title came up were character background and development. It did introduce characters and tell their purpose in the story, too. It was interesting at first, but it got old after a while. There was some drama, but it was just slow. I don't know why this movie wanted to be slow in the beginning. Some action movies have been slow in the beginning, but it just didn't work in this one. For the mood of this movie, the logical thing wouldn't be to be slow in the beginning. Being like this almost only takes points away from the movie. Knowing so much about the characters did imply different tones of the movie later on when things would reflect on the character's past. The slowness of the beginning of the movie didn't only consist of character background buildup. Only about half of it consisted of that.
'Pacific Rim' has great images and scenery, barely-below-average acting, average writing, amazing acting sequences, very deep characters, and is well done, but has some bad performances and some boring parts. It was very exciting, had explainable events and aspects, and had a good story. I very much recommend this movie and might buy this movie on DVD when it comes out. My 8/10 rating means 'Pacific Rim' is really good.